Jan

29

Workshop Ideas for 2007

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In a recent project meeting, we were tossing around ideas for workshops to conduct in 2007, and I've taken on a series of topics that could be loosely described as "new tools and strategies". Here's the current short list of workshops I'm planning to develop (and later conduct) through the TLC. Any glaring omissions?

  • Creative Commons (copyright and IP in general, and how they affect sharing and reusing available work)
  • Flickr. As a source of Creative Commons images for use, and as a potential tool for teaching and learning.
  • Google Earth. Basic overview, as well as an intro to some of the cool add-ons (geology, politics, etc…)
  • eXe - eLearning XML editor (for ePortfolios or personal websites)
  • WordPress.com (setting up a blog for free in seconds)
  • weblogs.ucalgary.ca (participating in the blog community on campus)
  • Drupal for websites and communities
  • Moodle (? this might be counterproductive, given Bb's role on our campus…)
  • Social bookmarking (del.icio.us for distributed tagging of resources)
  • Google Docs

I've left off a couple of items on purpose because I want to be doing things that aren't already running in full hype mode (podcasting and secondlife are fine on their own). I'm hoping to be showing stuff that might be flying under the radar (at least to most faculty on campus - many of the items on my list are completely taken for granted by tech types)

Comments

13 Responses to “Workshop Ideas for 2007”

  1. chris garrett on January 29th, 2007 3:32 pm

    Have you already done RSS and widgets? Lots of people see RSS and “dashboard” style views of data as important for knowledge workers who see tons of data fly past and don’t get to soak any of it in.

  2. dnorman on January 29th, 2007 5:19 pm

    I did RSS a few months ago, and found that most of the people that came just wound up baffled by acronyms and jargon. I need to figure out a better way to talk about RSS and aggregation and feeds and XML without having to talk about any of them… I was thinking maybe a session on Google Reader or BlogBridge (or both? too confusing to show multiple options?)

  3. John Martin on January 29th, 2007 7:10 pm

    Darn these 2600 miles between us. I would love to drop in on some of these discussions!

  4. John Martin on January 29th, 2007 7:16 pm

    I’m not sure if your campus licenses MS Office (and at risk of sounding like a crony) but one segue into RSS might be through the discussion surrounding Outlook 2007 and its built-in reader. I posted a review of my experiences (not all positive) and I think that this integration has the potential for expanding the use of RSS in campus situations. Particularly if it is likened to catalog shopping.

    Take a peek at BlogBridges’ Feed Library too, it’s an interesting visual representation of feeds that expands the catalog shopping metaphor.

    Review link: http://www.whitemountaintech.net/wordpress/2007/01/10/outlook-2007-and-rss/

    Feed Library:
    http://www.blogbridge.com/products-services/feed-library/

    Cheers!

    John

  5. dnorman on January 29th, 2007 7:21 pm

    John, I’ll try to record what I can and share with the rest of the class.

    For Outlook, I can’t in good conscience suggest that anyone actually use that, let alone recommending it as an RSS reader…

    The BB feed library is cool, but I’m not sure how valuable a central set of feeds would be to the University, with everyone having subtly (or dramatically) different areas of interest… It might be better to teach them all how to find feeds on their own and let them go forth and seek them out. Maybe they could also then share out their subscribed feeds…

    I’ll take a closer look, though.

  6. joshua on January 30th, 2007 12:15 pm

    How about Pachyderm? :)

  7. dnorman on January 30th, 2007 3:55 pm

    I thought about that, but our Pachyderm server on campus isn’t really set to scale to a large rollout, and our NMC membership status is currently in question, so I can’t point people to the NMC server in good conscience. But, assuming we solve those issues, yeah. I’d love to do a session on the ‘derm!

  8. Jim on January 31st, 2007 11:17 pm

    Why you no wiki wiki?

  9. dnorman on February 1st, 2007 8:54 am

    I hesitated to add wiki to the list - I’ve done wiki workshops on campus before, and they go sortof ok, but our wiki needs some loving before I unleash more folks on it. Also, I need to coordinate with our IT folks to see what their plan is for rolling out a supported wiki service, rather than having the entire campus continue to use the copy of MediaWiki that I snuck onto one of our TLC servers…

  10. todd on February 3rd, 2007 11:54 am

    I just delivered a workshop, Is software irrelevant? (desc) I plan to write up more about it later, but I felt it was one of the most successful ones I’ve done. It’s not that I’ve not tried to get folks interested in social bookmarking, aggregators etc. before, but it was always a hands-on, howto setting. This time, I spent an hour talking and demonstrating, and I stated up front the themes I wanted them to walk away with were access, sharing, and collaboration. The second hour, folks signed up with del.icio.us and google and were playing with del.icio.us, google docs & spreadsheets, and google reader. I think these participants are much more likely to actually use these tools compared to those that attended my single-tool, howto-oriented workshops I’ve offered before.

  11. dnorman on February 3rd, 2007 12:13 pm

    Todd, I think you may be onto something. All of the workshops I’ve done on this have been rather hands-on, and in retrospect I think that was paradoxically a Bad Idea™. Too much of the session is spent debugging logins and browsers and assessing familiarity with technology, and not enough is spent actually showing what this stuff can do. The end result is that the people who could get the most from the session wind up with a lame newbie intro, and the ones that need the most help are still flustered and frustrated by the technology. I’m going to try the session as more of a tour/demo, maybe following up with a series of screencasts to help people out as they try the stuff out on their own later…

  12. Chris L on February 3rd, 2007 3:08 pm

    Like most educational experiences there are many factors. I’ve had good and bad experiences being totally hands-on (which I still generally prefer) and with a lot of presentation and preparation. The obvious factors are time for the action and the tech abilities of the audience. The ideal experience (for my money) is a sequence of shared activities so you can alleviate both the technical problems of diving in and the passivity of being the sage on the stage.

    I don’t think people in a training session ever get the bigger picture that drives most of us– that takes time and personal integration. That’s where it comes down, in part, to charisma and personality… it ’s more like used car sales than anything else :)

  13. dnorman on February 3rd, 2007 8:31 pm

    I’ll break out my Herb Tarlek plaid jacket for the sessions…

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